Download or read book The Dream of the Moving Statue written by Kenneth Gross and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fantasy of a sculpture that moves, speaks;or responds, a statue that comes to life as an oracle, lover, avenger, mocker, or monster—few images are more familiar or seductive. The living statue appears in ancient creation narratives, the myths of Pygmalion and Don Juan, lyric poetry from the Greek Anthology to Rilke, and romantic fairy tales; it is a recurrent theme in ballet and opera, in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and film. What does it mean for the statue that stands immobile in gallery or square to step down from its pedestal or speak out of its silence? What is it in this fantasy that animates us? Kenneth Gross explores the implications of fictive statues in biblical and romantic narrative; in the poetry of Ovid, Michelangelo, Blake, Rilke, and Stevens; in the drama of Shakespeare; in the writings of Freud and Wittgenstein. He also considers their place in the poetry of such contemporaries as Richard Howard and the films of Charlie Chaplin, Frarn;ois Truffaut, and Peter Greenaway. In the motif of the moving statue, we can see how the reciprocal ambitions of writing and sculpture play off each other, often producing deeply paradoxical figures of life and voice, Stories of the living statue point to the uncertain ways in which our desires, fantasies, and memories are bound to the realm of unliving objects. Clarifying the sources of our fascination with real and imaginary statues, this book asks us to reconsider some of our most basic assumptions about the uses of fantasy and fiction. Eloquent and evocative, The Dream of the Moving Statue will capture and hold a wide audience.
Download or read book The Moving Statues of Seventeenth Century Amsterdam written by Angela Vanhaelen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-08-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven. Doolhoven were a type of labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest lodgings, these licensed public houses also housed remarkable displays of artwork in their gardens and galleries. The main attractions were inventive displays of moving mechanical figures (automata) and a famed set of waxwork portraits of the rulers of Protestant Europe. Publicized as the most innovative artworks on display in Amsterdam, the doolhoven exhibits presented the mercantile city as a global center of artistic and technological advancement. This evocative tour through the doolhoven pub gardens—where drinking, entertainment, and the acquisition of knowledge mingled in encounters with lively displays of animated artifacts—shows that the exhibits had a forceful and transformative impact on visitors, one that moved them toward Protestant reform. Deeply researched and decidedly original, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam uncovers a wealth of information about these nearly forgotten public pleasure parks, situating them within popular culture, religious controversies, global trade relations, and intellectual debates of the seventeenth century. It will appeal in particular to scholars in art history and early modern studies.
Download or read book Screening Statues written by Steven Jacobs and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dynamic, scholarly engagement with Susanne Bier's work
Download or read book Statues in Roman Society written by Peter Stewart and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-02-06 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Statues are among the most familiar remnants of classical art. Yet their prominence in ancient society is often ignored. In the Roman world statues were ubiquitous. Whether they were displayed as public honours or memorials, collected as works of art, dedicated to deities, venerated as gods, or violated as symbols of a defeated political regime, they were recognized individually and collectively as objects of enormous significance. By analysing ancient texts and images, Statues in Roman Society unravels the web of associations which surrounded Roman statues. Addressing all categories of statuary together for the first time, it illuminates them in ancient terms, explaining expectations of what statues were or ought to be and describing the Romans' uneasy relationship with 'the other population' in their midst.
Download or read book Sporting Dystopias written by Ralph C. Wilcox and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reaching beyond the popular celebration of commercial gains often associated with the proliferation of stadiums, events, and teams in the city, Sporting Dystopias explores the role of sport in the process of community building. Scholars from various fields, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, marketing, media studies, and sociology, examine the cultural, economic, and political interplay of sport and the city. The book systematically challenges the overwhelming claims of sport's benefit to the city as it scrutinizes the various tensions inherent in the relationship. Grounded in economic means, racial and ethnic affiliation, and the contestation for space, sport is seen as precipitating a broad range of human challenges.
Download or read book David Smith written by Michael Brenson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An essential account of America’s greatest sculptor . . . [A] magnum opus.” —Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary Supplement The landmark biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century. David Smith, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, did more than any other sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to his project of reimagining sculptural experience was challenging the stability of any identity or position—Smith sought out the unbounded, unbalanced, and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him “the greatest sculptor this country has produced.” Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works—among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as “salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things.” This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.
Download or read book Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare s Theatre written by Susan Zimmerman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, psychoanalysis and anthropology, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the 'dead' in early modern English culture.Susan Zimmerman argues that concepts of the corpse as a semi-animate, generative and indeterminate entity were deeply rooted in medieval religious culture. Such concepts ran counter to early modern discourses that sought to harden categorical distinctions between body/spirit, animate/inanimate - in particular, the attacks of Reformists on the materiality of 'dead' idols, and the rationale of the new anatomy for publicly dissecting 'dead' bodies. Zimmerman contends that within this context, theatrical representations of the corpse or corpse/revenant - as seen here in the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries - uniquely showcased the theatre's own ideological and performative agency. Features*Original in its conjunction of critical theory (Bataille, Kristeva, Lacan, Benjamin) with an historical account of the shifting status of the corpse in late medieval and early modern England.*The first study to demonstrate connections between the meanings attached to the material body in early modern Protestantism, the practice of anatomical dissection, and the English public theatre.*Strong market appeal to scholars and graduate students with interests in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern religion and science, and literary theory. *Relevant to advanced undergraduates taking widely taught courses in Shakespeare and in Renaissance drama.
Download or read book Sculpture and the Nordic Region written by Elettra Carbone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Histories of sculpture within the Nordic region are under-studied and the region?s influence upon and translation of influences from elsewhere in Europe remain insufficiently traced. This volume brings to light individual histories of sculptural mobility from the early modern period onwards. Examining the movement of sculptures, sculptors, practices, skills, styles and motifs across borders, through studios and public architectures, within popular and print culture and via texts, the essays collected here consider the extent to which the sculptural artwork is changed by its physical movement and its transfigurations in other media. How does the meaning and form of these objects performatively respond to the pressure of their relocations and rematerialisations? Conversely, how do sculptures impact their new contexts of display? The contributing authors engage with a wide variety of objects and media in their essays. Each focuses on the contextualisation of sculpture in an original and timely way, exploring how mobility acts as a filter offering new perspectives on iconography, memorialisation, collecting, iconoclasm and exhibiting. From the stave churches of early Norway to the decoration of International Style monoliths of the twentieth century, from Italian quarries to Baroque palaces, from fountains to figurines, from text to performance, these wide-ranging and fascinating case studies contribute to the rich history of the Nordic region?s sculptural production.
Download or read book Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis written by Nora Clark and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis is a broad, flexible source book of comparative literature and cultural studies. It promotes the wide-ranging presence and impact of prominent idiosyncratic personalities in fabled goddess mythology and its emphatic notions of endearment and allure. The book brings together seven hundred acknowledged sources drawn from successive historical, global and literary eras, including principal commentaries, along with factual information and important renditions in art, prose and verse, within and beyond mainstream western culture. A lengthy, detailed introduction presents a copious documented preview of the viable adaptation and mimesis of ‘divine’ characterization and its respective centrality from the long distant past to the present day. Myth, rarely latent, demonstrates varied modes of expression and open-ended flexibility throughout the six comprehensive chapters which illuminate and probe, in turn, aspects of the ideological presence, sensibilities, trials and triumphs and interventions of the goddess, whether sacred or profane. Particular literary extracts and episodes range across ancient cultures alongside quite recent expressions of hermeneutics, blending myth with the contemporary in the multi-layered reception or admonishment of the goddess, whether by one designation or the other. As such, this book is wholly relevant to all stages of the evolution and expansion of a dynamic European literary culture and its leading authors and personalities.
Download or read book Not Forgetting written by Rosalyn Deutsche and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-12-21 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores contemporary art that challenges deadly desires for mastery and dominion. Amid times of emboldened cruelty and perpetual war, Rosalyn Deutsche links contemporary art to three practices that counter the prevailing destructiveness: psychoanalytic feminism, radical democracy, and war resistance. Deutsche considers how art joins these radical practices to challenge desires for mastery and dominion, which are encapsulated in the Eurocentric conception of the human that goes under the name “Man” and is driven by deadly inclinations that Deutsche calls masculinist. The masculinist subject—as an individual or a group—universalizes itself, claims to speak on behalf of humanity, and meets differences with conquest. Analyzing artworks by Christopher D’Arcangelo, Robert Filliou, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, James Welling, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Deutsche illuminates the diverse ways in which they expose, question, and trouble the visual fantasies that express masculinist desire. Undermining the mastering subject, these artworks invite viewers to question the positions they assume in relation to others. Together, the essays in Not-Forgetting, written between 1999 and 2020, argue that this art offers a unique contribution to building a less cruel and violent society.
Download or read book Euripides and the Language of Craft written by Mary C. Stieber and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first in-depth account of Euripides' relationship with the visual arts demonstrates how frequently the tragedian used language to visual effect, whether through allusion or actual references to objects, motifs built around real or imaginary objects, or the use of technical terminology.
Download or read book Modern Art the Remaking of Human Disposition written by Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How artists at the turn of the twentieth century broke with traditional ways of posing the bodies of human figures to reflect modern understandings of human consciousness. With this book, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century modernism, transforming our understanding of the era’s canonical works. Butterfield-Rosen analyzes a hitherto unexamined formal phenomenon in European art: how artists departed from conventions for posing the human figure that had long been standard. In the decades around 1900, artists working in different countries and across different media began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures. The effect, both archaic and modern, broke with the centuries-old tradition of rendering bodies in torsion, with poses designed to simulate the human being’s physical volume and capacity for autonomous thought and movement. This formal departure destabilized prevailing visual codes for signifying the existence of the inner life of the human subject. Exploring major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky— replete with new archival discoveries—Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition combines intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the history of psychology and evolutionary biology. In doing so, it shows how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses.
Download or read book The Performance of Sculpture in Renaissance Venice written by Lorenzo G. Buonanno and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study reveals the broad material, devotional, and cultural implications of sculpture in Renaissance Venice. Examining a wide range of sources—the era’s art-theoretical and devotional literature, guidebooks and travel diaries, and artworks in various media—Lorenzo Buonanno recovers the sculptural values permeating a city most famous for its painting. The book traces the interconnected phenomena of audience response, display and thematization of sculptural bravura, and artistic self-fashioning. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance history, early modern art and architecture, material culture, and Italian studies.
Download or read book The Sculpted Ear written by Ryan McCormack and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound and statuary have had a complicated relationship in Western aesthetic thought since antiquity. Taking as its focus the sounding statue—a type of anthropocentric statue that invites the viewer to imagine sounds the statue might make—The Sculpted Ear rethinks this relationship in light of discourses on aurality emerging within the field of sound studies. Ryan McCormack argues that the sounding statue is best thought of not as an aesthetic object but as an event heard by people and subsequently conceptualized into being through acts of writing and performance. Constructing a history in which hearing plays an integral role in ideas about anthropocentric statuary, McCormack begins with the ancient sculpture of Laocoön before moving to a discussion of the early modern automaton known as Tipu’s Tiger and the statue of the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Finally, he examines statues of people from the present and the past, including the singer Josephine Baker, the violinist Aleksandar Nikolov, and the actor Bob Newhart—with each case touching on some of the issues that have historically plagued the aesthetic viability of the sounding statue. McCormack convincingly demonstrates how sounding statues have served as important precursors and continuing contributors to modern ideas about the ontology of sound, technologies of sound reproduction, and performance practices blurring traditional divides between music, sculpture, and the other arts. A compelling narrative that illuminates the stories of individual sculptural objects and the audiences that hear them, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the connections between aurality and statues in the Western world, in particular scholars and students of sound studies and sensory history.
Download or read book Sculpture and Touch written by Peter Dent and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Renaissance, at least, the medium of sculpture has been associated explicitly with the sense of touch. Sculptors, philosophers and art historians have all linked the two, often in strikingly different ways. In spite of this long running interest in touch and tactility, it is vision and visuality which have tended to dominate art historical research in recent decades. This book introduces a new impetus to the discussion of the relationship between touch and sculpture by setting up a dialogue between art historians and individuals with fresh insights who are working in disciplines beyond art history. The collection brings together a rich and diverse set of approaches, with essays tackling subjects from prehistoric figurines to the work of contemporary artists, from pre-modern ideas about the physiology of touch to tactile interaction in the museum environment, and from the phenomenology of touch in recent philosophy to the experimental findings of scientific study. It is the first volume on this subject to take such a broad approach and, as such, seeks to set the agenda for future research and collaboration in this area.
Download or read book Giving Ground written by Joan Copjec and published by Verso. This book was released on 1999-06-17 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume seeks to address a number of broad questions, including: what is the role and limit of urban space in the expression of group and individual rights and desires?; do democratic social relations require spatial propinquity?; and what are the characteristics of
Download or read book Push Me Pull You written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 1402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval and Renaissance viewers demanded art and architecture that provoked emotional and/or performative interactivity. The authors of these essays explore the history of this call and response from the view of both artists and devotees.
